The interaction between buckling and fracture may affect crack growth in thin riveted aircraft fuselage struc- tures. Buckling may also complicate and induce the phenomenon of multisite damage in aircraft fuselages. This buckling-fracture phenomenon in thin-walled structures is studied through an idealized model, a cracked and pin-loaded hole in a plate. Despite this simplification, a better understanding of the mechanisms of fatigue and fracture in thin-walled structures is obtained by a finite element model and an experiment, using holospeckle in- terferometry. The experimental studies show an interesting phenomenon, the presence of a combination of tearing mode III as well as opening mode I fracture mechanisms at the cracks in the pin-loaded plates after local buckling. This phenomenon is discussed, and further research is foreshadowed. that, in the regions where they are acting, the plate becomes unsta- ble and buckles. In numerical investigations, by the aid of finite element meth- ods (FEMs), the buckling of cracked members under tension has been analyzed by Markstrom and Storakers.5 They considered the effect of biaxial loading for one specific geometry, investigated the buckling behavior of three types of edge cracked members, and stated the interaction of local buckling and fracture. Using the FEM with triangular finite elements, Sih and Lee6 analyzed the tensile and compressive buckling of plates weakened by cracks (simulated by narrow ellipses). Results for the various buckling displacement modes have been obtained for tensile and compressive loads with the cracks oriented normal and parallel to the loading axis. The critical buckling loads were found to decrease with increasing crack size. Moreover, local wrinkling of the plate surface became less pro- nounced for the higher buckling modes. A recent study by Shaw and Huang7 investigated the buckling characteristics of cracked plates subject to uniaxial tensile loads by the aid of the FEM. They showed that crack buckling behavior is affected by the in-plane stress dis- tribution around a crack. With the foregoing in mind, there are quite a few studies on tension buckling, but all of them do not cover the local buckling problem of a central crack with a pin-loaded hole in the plate. The current inves- tigators realized that the local buckling phenomenon complicates fracture behavior in thin riveted aircraft structures. Since riveted joints in aircraft are complicated by a number of factors such as rivet bypassing and bearing forces, rivet tilt, and the friction associ- ated with rivet clamping forces, it is too difficult to get the theoretical solution. In this paper, a simplified model of a cracked riveted joint, that is a cracked and pin-loaded hole in a plate as shown in Fig. 1, has been used as a starting point for future investigations. This model is studied numerically and experimentally. The finite element studies